


Guest of Darkness

by Mortissimo



Category: Hellsing
Genre: Future Fic, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-10-09
Updated: 2019-10-14
Packaged: 2020-11-28 05:01:48
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 7,852
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20960903
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mortissimo/pseuds/Mortissimo
Summary: Heeding the call of an enemy long thought dead, an exile of more than a century is ended in London, and lost and broken ties are rediscovered and forged anew.





	1. I

**Author's Note:**

> Is this a crossover  
Is it OC fic  
What's going on  
Don't ask me

It was no steamer, and the train that followed certainly lacked the elegance of the last I had taken here, but the aeroplane and the now-completed Tube did their job well enough. No doubt it would have been more difficult had I been required to take my sleeping arrangement with me, or even arrange to have it shipped ahead, but here, there was no need. I was free of the thing. 

For the first time in 130 years, I was home. 

The sheer modernity of the place was what struck me most, as I climbed the stairs out of the station. It wasn't even that the old buildings had been scrubbed clean of the layer of soot and grime of my day; everything I saw was steel and glass and new. As soon as I had thought it, I realized the awful truth I was so close to. The last time I had been here was before not only the first Blitz in the 1940s, but the second in the late 90s as well. Everything I had known could have been knocked down and rebuilt twice over. 

It was with a foolish relief then that I smiled, as I rounded the last corner of glass and steel and at last came into view of the white stucco facades I knew I would find. I could hardly claim it was a real surprise; I had seen pictures before renting the place, of course. Where once a hapless new hire would have been sent out to meet me, up and down dangerous mountain passages in rickety carriages driven by suspect men, I had managed the entire transaction online, from thousands of miles away, without ever needing to inconvenience a single human being. And now here I was, at home in London once again after so long abroad. 

Inside, my new house was furnished somewhat sparsely, although I was more inclined to trust the company's tastes than my own after so long squatting in dusty and drafty castles. The interior was rather more modern than the miraculously preserved stucco outside, with a glass-fronted gas fireplace that flared to life as I crossed the threshold, and lights that rose to greet me as well. Bypassing the ground floor entirely, with its kitchen and washrooms destined for disuse and dustiness, I nudged open the door to the basement, and descended the steps. Of all my odd conditions, I believe they found this request the strangest, to outfit the basement room as a bedroom. In truly English fashion, their email was both apologetic and judgmental as they explained to me that they could not build a washroom downstairs, and that there would be no windows either, and alone in that week's abandoned castle I had laughed aloud. 

Here in my basement room, I smiled to think of it as I dropped my meager possessions onto the floor beside the bed with a loud  _ thunk _ . I always forget how heavy my sword case is until I set it down, and feel the vibrations through my feet, or when some hapless human volunteers to help me carry it. Gingerly, I picked up the corner to check the floor, but I didn't seem to have done any real damage to the wood. 

"Well then," I told the empty room. "I suppose this is it." Though I didn't need to at my age, I had arrived with the setting sun, and my brief tour of the ground and underground levels of my home had probably given the night time to pull its blankets up over the city. It was time my great hunt resumed. 

* * *

  
  


It was about a week ago that the call caught me in my unbeating heart and threw me to my knees. I was not on a hunt at the time, luckily, either for food or for judgment, or it very likely could have done me in. As it was, I fell to the flagstones of the castle, tearing the knees of my trousers and the palms of my gloves. I felt breaths heaving in and out, as they so rarely did in these nights when I spoke to so few, and in my chest, in place of my long-still heart, beat the words  _ he's alive, he's alive, thank God, he's alive.  _

The spell itself lasted only a moment before the feeling faded, leaving me gasping on the floor like a landed fish, but it lasted long enough. For the first time in more than a century, I knew that Dracula lived, and I knew where I could find him. My knowledge of the latter faded with the sudden drumbeat of emotion, leaving only the former certainty behind. Dracula lived, and either was back near London once more, or else had never left. I put my affairs in order and purchased a house in Kensington within the week. 

As I descended the steps from my new home, I began to feel the enormity of the task weigh heavy on my shoulders. I knew Dracula had been nearby a week ago, yes, but even after its near-destruction 30 years ago, London was massive and populous. It was more of a challenge to find him now than it would have been before then, given the number of houses and flats and whole buildings left empty in the wake of the attack. 

To begin, I closed my mortal eyes and let my third eye be my guide. The psychic damage from the second blitz was only now beginning to fade, and even so I could still see screams and writhing written on the streets around me. At first I walked aimlessly, the mortals stepping out of my way with blind wariness, uneasy in my presence though they could not see me. I was in one end of Hyde Park and out the other before I realized that I had caught the scent after all. Once I realized what it was I was seeing, I stopped in my tracks to stare in horror. 

The path I had been following was a thin red line that twisted and fluttered in intangible winds as it wove through the air. I had taken it for the form of a ribbon, but once I was past the empty paths of the park, and back onto the main thoroughfare, I could see others. I stopped and stared, amazed and afraid, at the thousands of twisting and glittering strands of blood, all joining the one lonely rivulet I had found, into a massive river winding its way northeast. There are some things that appear to the third eye in metaphor, like ghosts, but this was a memory, a psychic stain upon the city, and as I reluctantly took up the path again, I saw that yet more rivers joined the one I had found, until at last the street opened up, and I saw Trafalgar Square drowned in an ocean of blood. 

With a shudder, I opened my mortal eyes, as much in defense of my own sanity as to continue the hunt. I could not forget what I had seen, but I didn't have to live it either. As slowly as a pallbearer, I climbed the steps to the square. Lord Nelson was the original, I was sure, crusted with bird lime as per usual, but the column was new. Shorter, I thought. Something had toppled it, probably in the second blitz. I let my memory of the psychic stain drive me forward, until at last I came to what had drawn my attention. With my mortal eyes, it was a section of concrete of a slightly lighter shade than the rest around it, but as I blinked my third eye quickly open and closed again, I confirmed what I thought I had seen from afar; this patch was new. Whatever had happened here had been dug out and paved over again, taking with it the stain of the blood that had soaked into the rest of the square, and it was then I knew I stood in the place where Dracula had died his third death in 1998. 

Ignoring the foot traffic around me, I knelt beside the spot and peeled away my glove, laying my hand on the (somewhat) cleaner concrete. At the edge of my peripheral vision, a pair of black leather shoes came to a gradual stop before me. Mortal, I assumed, breaking through my mild glamour with the typically English disdain for people doing unusual things in public. Until he spoke, and I instantly recognized that voice I had not heard in nearly a century and a half, that voice which haunted my nightmares and my dreams alike, that made me start at shadows and stare longingly into crowds at the hope that I had finally heard correctly. 

"'Do not stand at my grave and weep,' Jonathan," Dracula recited, gentle as a lullaby. "'I am not there. I do not sleep.'" At that, he knelt before me, his great red coat settling around him like massive wings. I found myself unable to move or speak, unable to look at him again in the flesh, after so long chasing his shadow. I had dreamed of this moment and of the moments after, in my coffin and in makeshift hovels, had awoken gasping, with my face awash in blood tears and my hands clutched on nothing. Dumbstruck, I watched his long fingers slide over mine, gloved in white with a strange symbol embroidered on the back. His touch was as cool as I remembered, even through the cloth, though of course now so was mine. With his other hand he cupped my chin and carefully tilted my face up to him. 

"It really is you," he murmured, with all the wonder in my heart in his voice. Dracula swept a thumb beneath my eye and brought it up to his mouth, his long tongue snaking out shamelessly to taste the blood I had failed to recognize I was weeping. 

"And you're mine," observed Dracula in surprise. "All this time, and you're mine, and I didn't know."

"You died," I found myself saying, sobbing. I had not seen him so gentle since he had wrenched me from the fangs of his brides and brought me feverish to my bedchamber, had sat beside me and stroked my hair and fed me sips of a heavy, metallic tea I had only much later come to realize was not tea at all. 

"You helped kill me," he pointed out, his tone still so soft that I could not stem the flow of tears from my eyes. At last, I found it in me to move, and pushed my free hand hard to the center of his chest, where his unbeating heart lay cold and still, as mine did. 

"We dreamed about you. Nightly, almost." His shirt twisted under my fingers, the sound of threads snapping as loud as gunfire to my hearing. "In order to survive, have you ever killed something you love? Have you ever destroyed a thing only to feel its absence beside you, between you, for the rest of your days?" For years we awoke on opposite sides of the bed, leaving space between us for a third, even on nights we did not seek one out. We would wake at odd hours and turn together as one, grasping one another closer in a vain attempt to feel the whole that had never quite been, of Dracula, myself and Mina all together. 

"Why did you have to come to us as a hunter?" I could hear my voice break, as I tugged him closer, closer yet. If he drew breath, I would have felt it on my face. "If you had come to us both as a lover, we–" in the spare inch before our lips met for the first time in more than a century, his gloved hand slipped between us, over my mouth.

"Jonathan." Very seriously, his eyes like coals met mine and Dracula asked, "Do you really want to do this in the middle of Trafalgar Square?"

I jumped back from him like a scalded cat, abruptly flustered despite myself, then tried in vain to pull myself back together as his sonorous laughter rang out all around the square. Whether or not anyone had seen us before, I wasn't certain, but we certainly drew every eye now. If my heart still beat, I'd have been as red as his coat, but I settled for scrubbing the last of the blood tears from my face, feeling like a chastened child.

"I didn't think so," Dracula sighed theatrically, as smug as he ever had been. "Perhaps in the next hundred years you'll outgrow your Victorian propriety." The strength of my desire for him still stunned me, but somehow, in the century of chasing down the scraps of his legacy, I had managed to forget how completely infuriating Dracula was. 

"Perhaps," I said shortly, turning back the way I had come. "If you would accompany me back home, we could continue this conversation more privately." I dragged my heels as much as I could while still moving forward, walking away from him, and for a few moments he let me, and I felt my heart begin to plummet. Then, without a sound, he was beside me, slipping his arm through mine and matching his long-legged strides to my own. 

In truth, we hardly drew attention walking through the middle of London arm in arm. Those who did stare did so briefly, and mostly at Dracula, at his height and his unabashed crimson stare, or at his broad grin, both infectious and terribly ominous. My own red eyes I hid behind dark glasses even now, preferring to pass as eccentric though I suppose I could have easily passed as albino, between my towhead and my vampiric pallor. Dracula seemed to have dispensed with hiding altogether, and as though he had plucked the thought from my mind, he pulled abruptly away from me as we came to the park's edge. 

"What is it?" I asked, but he was already striding away from me across the lawn. Warily, I put a hand on the hilt of the sabre stowed in my long coat. It was more that I assumed he had seen some danger I was unaware of, or that I may have to dissuade him from interfering with some other persons trespassing in the park at night. I did not expect an attack from him, though apparently I should have done, as I got exactly that. 

As we passed through the first widely spaced band of trees Dracula stopped abruptly, turning on his heel and leveling an enormous pistol at me. I stumbled to a stop as well, and foolishly I took my hand off of my sabre, raising both hands above my head on bewildered surrender. 

"I bear you no ill will," I protested, and he smiled. 

"I know," Dracula replied, and fired. 

Caught off-guard or not, I had not survived a hundred years hunting the supernatural on the continent by happenstance. The bullet passed through empty space that had only just before held my heart, as I sprang up over his head and landed behind, my sword now drawn and pointed at his back. 

"Is this revenge, then?" I was genuinely puzzled. We each had reasons to hate the other, but my joy at seeing him again had been unfeigned, and I had thought his to be as well. 

Dracula laughed, and the sound echoed through the park as it had across Trafalgar Square. 

"This is a game," he said, and pointed a second gun at me, over his shoulder. I froze briefly in further confusion, made worse as two red eyes and a broad, toothy grin split the shadow of his long, dark hair. He fired again, and at this range it was no real difficulty to knock the shell aside with my sabre, though the sheer size of the thing did give me some pause. What was Dracula armed to hunt these days? 

"Or if you'd prefer…" I turned in a flash as I heard his echoing purr behind me, my sword at the ready, but behind there was nothing but shadows, and when I realized my mistake and faced him again, he was gone. 

"This is a test," Dracula said, the barrel of his gun cold against the base of my skull, and a moment later he fired. This time, I felt the kick of the barrel against the back of my head, felt the bullet touch my scalp, and in reflex I tore my consciousness into a wisps of mist. Dracula laughed again in delight. Well, if he liked that, I supposed I had more for him. 

I pulled myself back into solidity at his side and for the first time struck out at him with my sword, slicing clean through the still-outstretched wrist that held the pistol he had placed against my head. Reattaching or even regenerating a hand was, after all, a simple task at my age, and I assumed it would be even less of a problem at his. 

Sure enough, he turned to me without a pause and fired his other gun, the wild shot catching me in the shoulder. The wound burned unexpectedly, answering some of the question of what Dracula had been armed to hunt: us. But my sword was silver as well, and though I hated to waste them, so were my many knives. 

This time, when I struck for his shoulder, coat and flesh and all parted before my blade could make contact. The rend split him down to his feet, showing nothing within but an inky, oozing blackness dotted with scarlet eyes. Was this what Dracula had always been? How on Earth had we mortals prevailed against him, unless the intimations of our long conversations in his home had been genuine after all, and it was peace he sought above all else? Well. He wasn't going to find it at my hand now. As I drew back my sword, his flesh closed behind, leaving his side whole once more, and even his hands with their heavy steel burdens came creeping up his legs toward his arms. 

"You're not fighting for your life," he observed, eyeing my stance and sounding somewhat disappointed. He was, of course, correct.

"I'm not fighting for yours, either," I pointed out. Perhaps it was my years with only his legacy for lasting company, but I found myself curiously untroubled by the revelation of what lay beneath his flesh. I had lost and regrown nearly every part of my own body by now, after all–even now, the wound in my shoulder twisted with more fog than blood as it knit itself slowly back together. 

As I sheathed my sabre back inside my coat, I found myself tackled to the grass before I could blink. I rolled to my back, and Dracula loomed large above me, the waning crescent moon behind him like a parody of a halo. His hands found my wrists and pressed them hard to the earth, though I had offered no resistance, and planned to offer none. Although I knew better, I swore I could feel my heart battering my ribs in a cacophony of feeling. Dracula grinned a predator's grin down on me, his teeth sharp and white and glistening wet, and beneath him I found myself arching against his implacable hands, not to get away but to press myself closer. 

"Such a shame. I never got the taste of you I wanted while you were alive." With inexorable slowness, he leaned down close and unfurled that inhuman tongue of his, dragging the flat of it in a lascivious swipe beneath my collar, across my jaw, up my throat and into my hairline. I keened to feel his teeth in me, his tongue, his cock, anything. It had been so long since I'd had anything of Dracula inside me, and it was all I found myself able to want. 

"You won't kiss me in Trafalgar Square, but you'll beg me to fuck you in Hyde Park, eh?" I could feel the edge of fangs on every word he spoke, pressed hard against the skin of my neck. My legs had wrapped tight around his waist, my hips twitching with every movement of his lips, and his hands on my wrists had budged not an inch. 

"Please," was the only word I knew, and I used it with abandon, uncaring of anyone else trespassing in the park at night, chanting the word again and again until finally, chuckling, Dracula sank in his fangs. 

Though his brides had had me first, and I'd had other, fleeting vampire lovers in the time between, I had never felt  _ his _ fangs tear into me before. The pain of the kiss shot through me like lightning, followed quickly by twisting pleasure, heat, a feeling of possession and belonging I had not known for many, many years. 

A blink of an eye, and I found myself on my knees, my throat cold and wet with his spit and my blood. Without ceremony, he dragged my overcoat off and my trousers down, exposing me to the night as he pushed me down to my elbows. Before I could voice any misgivings, if I truly had any to give, I felt his mouth again, a rough nip at the top of my spine, at the small of my back, at my tailbone, and then, without warning, his tongue pushed inside. I must have made some mad, inhuman sound at the feeling, as his laughter rang this time within my skull, not without. The shove of his tongue was slick but merciless, unnaturally prehensile and long enough to brush against that place within that made me sob into the dirt, pushing my hips back against his face. 

Even that assault lasted only a moment, long enough to wet and to stretch, before he slithered free of the clutch of my body and pulled me upright and panting against him, with a hand at my throat as the other, unseen, tugged at the fastenings of his own clothing. 

"Tell me you want this," he demanded, a low growl in my ear but a question nonetheless. "Ask. Beg for my cock." In contrast with the rough words, his touch was light as he stroked his fingertips down my chest to where I strained for him, untouched, and I was all too eager to comply.

"Please," I whispered as his hand closed around me, the word closing on a sob. "Please let me feel you again. Fuck me, please, Dracula." At last, at long last, the blunt head of his cock pressed into me, followed by the inexorable, implacable length of him. He was not as cold as I had remembered from that opulent sickbed in Transylvania, but he still felt huge and hard as stone within me. As he began to move, both his cock within me and his hand upon me, I let my head fall back on his shoulder, content to lose myself in the long-lost pleasure of Dracula's lovemaking. Already, I could feel my peak approaching, and from the rare involuntary grunts in my ear, I suspected I was not alone. As I began to lose myself to my climax, I felt his other hand upon my face, and turned into the touch to meet his mouth at last, unexpectedly sweet, in a long-awaited kiss. With a growl, he spent inside me, and I in his fist, my fingers tangled in his long black hair. 

The sudden flash of the policeman's torch sort of spoiled the mood.

* * *

  
  


There is a trick to staying yourself when forcing your body into an unnatural form. It requires an immense degree of concentration. In my travels, I heard of vampires who had been startled into mist, or bats, or what have you, only to forget that they had ever been anything like human, and vanish with the sunrise. Myself, I had never before taken mist form while quite as distracted as I was then, and for the barest moment I began to lose the edges of my consciousness, the equally startled police losing all shape and meaning as I drifted and curled like smoke. 

_ Pull yourself together, Jonathan, _ I heard a voice tell me abruptly, sounding for all the world like the growl I had heard in my ear only moments before. I became aware that I had drifted past Kensington Palace to the edge of the park, where waiting for me stood a tall, tall man with one hand outstretched, the other holding a bottle green overcoat. As insubstantial as a ghost, I took his hand first, watching my own become flesh and something like blood against the white of his glove. Then my arm, my shoulder, the rest of my body followed and Dracula caught me carefully in his arms until my feet touched the pavement as light as a dancer. Without a word, he helped me back into my overcoat. By reflex (on my part at least), we had both rematerialized with our clothes and our hair and all back in order, and I was surprised to find I missed our brief moment of disarray and chaotic impulse. There were no marks left on either of our bodies that he hadn't left on me while I was alive. A pity, I thought. 

"Shall we?" He asked, and I led the way, though it would not have surprised me to learn he already knew where I was staying. I did not take his arm again, and he didn't offer, but we walked still in companionable silence, the fabric of my sleeve rasping occasionally against his. 

Back at the house, I unlocked the door and ushered him inside with a gesture. I could not see his face, but he didn't sound entirely approving.

"Not what I expected from the outside," Dracula mused, trailing a hand across the back of the leather sofa as he crossed the living room. "Then again, neither were you."

"Thanks," I said, "I think." When he turned to me, he was smiling, and he rounded the sofa to take a seat at the other end. The sudden passion that had flared so brightly between us seemed to have abated almost entirely, leaving a tension to the air that strained tighter the longer I stood by the door. 

"You must have only just arrived," he guessed, accurately. I swallowed. 

"Yes."

"Dropped off your things and come to hunt me, still smelling of Carpathian pine. Tell me, Jonathan, what did you find in my homeland?" I made up my mind at last, draped my overcoat over a chair and sat in the middle of the sofa, close enough that our knees brushed when either of us moved, and I could feel his thumb slowly stroking the leather where his hand lay on the back of the sofa. 

"You understand that I wasn't looking for you," I began, and Dracula nodded along. "Until last week, I thought you'd been dead all these years. What I sought was your past, not my future. I needed to understand what you had been,  _ who _ you had been, in order to better understand what I had become."

"And do you?" He asked me curiously, reaching out to remove the dark glasses I had become so accustomed to wearing, to set them on the coffee table. "Do you understand me? Do you understand yourself?" I didn't know how to properly answer either of those questions, and the steady movements of his thumb against my shoulder did nothing to help. 

"I would say I was marginally successful in both respects," I said at last, and this seemed to be the correct answer. "For myself, I found monsters and men in equal measure, and some who were both, and many others who claimed to be one and turned out to be the other. I was able to test my capabilities. I learned my limits many times, and many times I overcame them." His hand was on my shoulder now, picking at the stitching of my coat as though it held some meaning for him. 

"And what did you learn of me that you had not already known?" The sudden brush of glove above my collar startled me, but even then Dracula regarded me with solemn intensity. My opinion of him mattered to him, I realized, perhaps belatedly, perhaps foolishly. Nevertheless, it was true. 

"I found that the tales of you differed with the language. In German, you were a tyrant. In Turkish, a genocidal maniac. In Slavic tongues, a monster." I could see the intensity in his eyes darkening, like the windows of a house with the shades drawn sharply against prying eyes. When I dropped my hand on his knee he did glance down, looking as puzzled as I had ever seen him. "What I had not expected were the histories in your own people's tongue naming you a hero. I did not expect the ballad which implored you to return and set your homeland to rights again. I admit I had never thought of you as your title, and had not considered what you had been to become what you are." The cloth of his glove was soft against my face, well-worn with age. It seemed strange to me that he would not remove them, but no stranger than his sudden reluctance to meet my eyes. 

"That poem is older than you are," he said finally, his fingers tracing a path over my eyebrow, behind my ear. "Tell me you're not so stupid as to believe I was ever anyone's savior." 

"You were the monster you needed to be," I replied. Abruptly, he slid away from me, leaving behind a cold and hollow feeling in his absence, though I had never known his hands to carry any warmth. He crossed back to the door and then stopped, one hand on the knob, and addressed me over his shoulder, through the thick black curtain of his hair. 

"Stay in town. I'll call on you tomorrow." 


	2. OMAKE 1

"What the hell is this?" Integra slammed her phone down on the desk in front of Alucard, startling him out of his reverie. When he glanced down at it, the screen showed a headline: 'HYDE PARK POLICE GONE BATTY.' With effort, Alucard gave a mildly interested _ hmm _ and picked up the phone to scroll down.

_ Midnight, Hyde Park: Police responding to reports of screams and gunshots in the park after dark claim to have stumbled on two men _ in flagrante delicto. _ When confronted, the two men reportedly 'exploded into fog and disappeared.' Witnesses described one of the men chanting, 'Please f**k me, Dracula.' Officers and witnesses have declined to provide their names. Dracula could not be reached for comment._

"What nonsense," Alucard said at length, setting the phone back down. Through superhuman effort, he managed to keep a straight face, though his shoulders shook with laughter. "Nobody even tried to get ahold of me."


	3. II

For the first time in years, I slept undisturbed through the day, and woke at nightfall from a dream I had not had in decades. It was late spring perhaps, or early summer, and my wife was heavily pregnant. The afternoon sun was only just beginning to wane, lighting up the Palm House behind her like fire, turning her hair into gold and his eyes into rubies. We sat together on a blanket, the three of us, with the carcass of a long-dead picnic scattered all around. I didn't know how long we'd been there, but it felt as though we'd had forever. 

I turned to Mina to remark upon the mild weather, when behind me I heard a wet, solid thunk, a sick crunching I heard three times in my life and then so many times after my death. I froze, holding her smiling blue gaze, afraid to look behind me, and knowing what I would see there. The sound that followed was less a death rattle and more a weary sigh, so forlorn that I could no longer resist the urge to turn and look, even with the knowledge of what I would look upon. 

Inevitably, I turned.

The major wound was hidden beneath his clothes, only the swiftly spreading red across the white of his shirt betraying its depth. As he gazed at me, I saw the fire in his scarlet eyes dim, and die, leaving them in a cold and empty parody of peace. He tipped his chin up to chase the rays of dying sunlight filtered through the greenhouse and from ear to ear that second smile I had gifted him with gaped wide, and began to ooze the thick and lifeless facsimile of blood the undead carry in our veins. I turned away before I could watch him crumble into dust a second time, or a thousandth, only to freeze as I saw the creeping threads of red slowly soaking across the blanket from my other side. 

As though from a distance, I became aware of the sound of Mina sobbing. 

"He took him," was all she said, over and over, varied only by the occasional interspersed: "he took our son." 

As with him, I knew what I would see. As with him, I could not help but look. 

Mina's white dress was rucked around her knees, the hem stained a burgundy so dark it looked nearly black, the front hanging empty where it had been stretched so tight moments before, her hands loose and lifeless in her lap. Her face was pale as her dress but for the high spots of color in her cheeks, and as I met her eyes I saw that she wept blood. 

I knew what would come next: that awful sound, the scrape of the ribs and the squelch of the meat, the idiot spasms of the long-dead heart. 

I braced myself to hear my Mina's dying groans once more. 

What came from her open lips, though, was not her voice, light and tremulous, but his, dark and invasive, filling every corner of the dream with my name until I could not help but open my eyes and lose the horrific sight for one more night. 

As I stared up at the bare ceiling of my basement bedroom, I felt a previously unnoticed weight at the end of the bed shift, and I grabbed wildly for the knives under my pillow. 

"Jonathan," Dracula said again, soft and patient, and I slowly uncurled my fingers from their hilts. 

"Count," I answered tersely, still unnerved by the dream as much as by his unexpected presence. "I'd assumed you would be by somewhat later." 

"I could hear you calling, now that I know to listen. Now that I'm alone in here, or nearly so." The basement room was not a large one, and most of the space was taken up by the bed alone. With him sitting at the foot though, it did not feel very large at all. Dracula had always had a way of filling a room. 

"Could you see what I saw?" I assumed not, though I'd heard of vampires who could inhabit the minds of their get almost fully, and I supposed I roughly counted as one of his. But no, he shook his head and stood, slipping out of his red overcoat and folding it carefully. 

"I heard you. Felt you. You called out for me, and now that I have the taste of your blood, I heard." Setting down the overcoat, he began on the buttons of his blazer. He was still wearing those odd gloves, I noted. "Incidentally, I use 'Alucard' these days."

"Do you really." I pushed myself into a sitting position, gathering the counterpane around my waist. It seemed that Dracula–Alucard–was planning to join me, but I wasn't sure I'd quite decided how I felt about that. "Always one for the subtle nicknames, aren't you, Mr. De Ville?"

"That was _ Count _ De Ville to you, I believe," he answered mildly, setting one coat on top of the other. 

"Yes, your Excellency, thank you." That made him laugh, which had been my aim, though he did so more softly this time than he had outdoors. After he had coiled the tie he wore loosely about his neck on top of the coats, Alucard sat to remove his boots. 

"You're very welcome," he answered at last, boots set aside, in shirtsleeves and trousers as he crawled onto the bed. I allowed him to crowd me onto my back, but the touch of cloth as his knuckles grazed my cheek sparked in me what has occasionally been a dangerous curiosity. 

"Why do you not remove your gloves?" I asked plainly, as much genuine inquiry as it was request. Momentarily frozen, he held my gaze with an unreadable look, then dropped his head to my chest and sighed. 

"Is it enough for you that I can't?" What power was there that subsumed the great count's will, so thoroughly that he did not even chafe under the bit? Twisting on my back, I picked up his left hand and brought it closer to my face, so as to better inspect the occult symbols there. It was no eldritch or foreign word that caught my ire, however, and dropped kindling on the ever-burning embers of the hatred that drives me. It was a name, terribly well known to me, and often reviled, burned deep into my brain long before it had ever taken the Anglicized form that cursed family now bore, and now it stared at me from atop the star at the back of Alucard's hand. 

"How could you," I hissed, and was treated to the rare sight of Dracula staring up at me with genuine alarm. I don't think he'd seen me angry since I'd killed him, and not frequently before. In a flash, I'd thrown him off of me and onto the floor, where he gazed upon me with what seemed to be genuine confusion. 

"What–"

"He _ killed _ her. Seven years she lived as this, never taking any blood but mine, _ never _ harming a hair on, on… Mina _ never hurt a soul _ , and when he found out what she was, he _ killed her anyway _." Even now, I could not speak either name, the one burning with hatred and the other with deepest sorrow. 

"Mina _ turned _?" Alucard found his knees, but the moment he moved toward me once more, my knife was at his throat, in a strange reflection of our past. 

"She died in… In childbirth. And rose again as the undead. Until _ he _ killed her." My hands, so steady these hundred years, shook, drawing a thin line of blood across his throat. Abruptly, the image and my words brought my dream back upon me full force, and I dropped the knife, covering my face with my hands. 

"I didn't know," he murmured, small and soft. I was beyond caring by now.

"Just go," I said into my hands, knowing he would hear me no matter how softly I spoke. 

When I next raised my head, he had vanished without a sound, leaving behind the clothing he had removed, like a promise. 

* * *

Unable to rest, I found myself wandering the streets of London, lightly armed with only the sabre in my coat and a few knives secreted elsewhere on my person. If Dracula was in the business of hunting monsters now, I supposed there couldn't have been many monsters left. I had no real destination in mind, and found myself meandering purposelessly toward the City. I bore south deliberately, out of the white Kensington stucco and into the brick of Chelsea, not so much aiming to go anywhere in particular as to avoid intersecting Trafalgar Square. 

It was not so late into the night, and despite the population hit London had taken in 1998, the streets still bustled. Forsaking my previous casual invisibility, I wore my dark glasses, and even then garnered few strange looks. There were odder creatures than myself about, after all. It almost seemed as though 30 years had been enough to erase the second blitz from the municipal memory, were it not for the odd moments where in of a row of old red brick, a modern, hard-edged home would stand out like harsh stitching on a wound, like an unconvincing veneer standing in for a missing tooth. 

I was lost in thought, but not so lost in thought that I failed to notice, in the buzzing light of a corner shop, that I was casting too many shadows. As though it had seen me see it, my supernumerary shadow saluted and detached, meandering casually toward the deeper darkness of a narrow alley between shops. After a moment's hesitation, I followed, my hand resting on the hilt of my sword. 

At first, I saw nothing but darkness, and blinked, before I realized that I should never encounter a night so complete in modern, well-lit London. I drew my sword the first inch from its sheath, shifting my weight from one foot to the other. Where was–Ah! I saw a single orange eye wink at me from high up on one wall, and readied myself for an attack. 

None came.

"Sorry to startle you," rang out the unexpected voice of a stranger. A woman. "It's just that the Master doesn't really have friends, as a rule, and we were wondering who you were!" Lord, she sounded chipper. I could not remember sounding so cheerful even when I had been alive. Which, of course, neither of the two of us now were. 

I wondered how many monsters Alucard had created, on top of those he had slain. 

"It is generally impolite to request an introduction whilst invisible," I directed to the darkness on the whole, and the alley entire moved like a sigh. 

"It's also impolite to make new friends while holding a weapon!" The alley responded, indignant.

"You sent a shadow to lure me into the darkness, I think perhaps I've earned my concern," I pointed out, I thought reasonably. All about me, the shadows of the alley trembled and began to recede, toward a corner I had not paid any heed to whatsoever

"Oh… I suppose you're right. Sorry about that!" Rubbing the back of her head sheepishly, the woman who emerged was both precisely what I expected, and nothing like, all at once. Blonde, with a strikingly short skirt, her most prominent features were her enormous scarlet eyes, and the jagged, flickering shadow where her left arm should have been. Sweet voice and manner aside, there was no mistaking her for anything but a true child of Dracula. Cautiously, I uncurled my fingers from their death grip upon my sabre. 

"My name is Jonathan," I told her truthfully. "And who might you be?" To my surprise, she snapped a neat salute, the heels of her sensible boots clicking together. 

"Seras Victoria!" She answered smartly. "Of the Royal Order of Protestant Knights!" _ Ah _, I thought, glancing at the patch on her shirt. 

"You mean Hellsing. You work for Hellsing." Had Alucard created an army for his new master? That hardly seemed right; a faceless soldier, one of many, would hardly take it upon herself to stalk and greet her master's 'friend.' She must be unique, or nearly so. But what could have provoked him to create her at all? 

"Yes, sir! Just hit 30 years!" She looked so proud, the strange creature. 

"And are you here to kill me?" The question seemed to genuinely startle Miss Victoria, who gave it a moment of serious thought. 

"I don't think so… We haven't been given a Search and Destroy order, or at least I haven't… And Master probably hasn't, since you're not dead yet. So no, I don't think I am. We just wanted to see what you were like. We didn't know the Master had any friends." I glanced around the alley, even blinking my invisible eye, but there was nobody else to be seen, no unnatural darkness that they could be hiding in. 

"Who is this 'we' you keep referring to?" I finally asked her outright.

"Oh! Um… It's mostly me and my shadows," she explained, looking caught out, as though she hadn't realized she was doing it in the first place. "Though I suppose Sir Integra was also wondering what Alucard was up to…" The leader of Hellsing and scion of the line. Of course she was interested. I had to admit that the girl had done a fine job of lowering my guard, just for a moment, with her doe eyes and her sweet voice, but I had no intention of being slain by an agent of Hellsing tonight. 

Without another word, I leapt straight up and tore myself into shreds of mist. The farther apart the particulate matter of my form grew, the more difficulty I had retaining an _ I _ at all, the more difficulty I found in returning, but the closer I stayed to a discrete form, the more trackable I would be. So I let myself mingle with the evening fog rising from the streets, let what was left of my soul drift and twine with the wind, twisting through the streets at random, and for once, almost at peace. Perhaps it would not be so bad to fade with the morning dew.

_ No _ , I heard with something that was not my ears, felt with scraps of spirit that had no nerves left to feel. _ We are not done with one another yet. _ Like a river to the sea, I found myself inexorably drawn toward the voice, toward Alucard. He did not compel so much as request, seduce, but I was powerless as ever to resist him, and against my will or no I found myself suddenly whole, standing in the very place I had been committed to avoiding. Trafalgar Square was curiously deserted, but still I could feel him there, the most powerful presence I had ever known, pressing upon me like an embrace. For a spare moment, I allowed myself to sink into the feeling of being held, of being owned and claimed as my motley birth into darkness had never allowed me to feel. 

But it was only a moment before the feeling was gone, and the presence of the count with it, leaving me standing alone on a patch of mismatched concrete.


	4. OMAKE 2

Seras stood in shocked silence for a moment, her jaw practically on the ground.

"H-he," she managed to stutter, pointing a finger at the space where the strange vampire had been a moment ago. "He's  _ gone! _ "

She'd been nice, hadn't she? Oh, she shouldn't have brought up Sir Integra! Everything has been going… Well, ok, things had been going pretty bad before she'd mentioned Integra, but then he'd just leapt into the sky and then…

"Oh my God," Seras groaned in horrified realization. "I blew up the Master's boyfriend!"

**Author's Note:**

> So uh it took me 16 years to finish watching Hellsing, and I've never read all of Dracula.  
Anyway I like two things: Vampires and space vampires  
I don't know what happened here, I was possessed by a sexy demon and then there was a story  
There should have been more fighting  
Did you ever notice Hellsing has the WEIRDEST tone??


End file.
